Prasenjit Duara Historicizing National Identity, Or Who Imagines What And
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Prasenjit Duara Historicizing National Identity, or Who Imagines What and When Bom in Assam, India, Prasenjit Duara's educational and professional odyssey took him from undergraduate training at St. Stephens College in Delhi, to the doctoral program at Harvard, teaching at George Mason University and Stanford University, to his current position at the University of Chicago. A specialist in modern Chinese history, Duara's first book was the prizewinning Culture, Power and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942 (Stanford Calif.: Stanford Univer- sity Press, 1988), which has been translated into both Chinese and Japanese. This For a long time now nationalism and national identity have been understood essay reprises ideas from Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Nar- within the assumptions of modernization theory. The effort to define nationalism ratives of Modem China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). His cur- as a quintessentially modern phenomenon in which citizens identify with the rent work, on the period of Japanese rule in Manchuria, the time of the ' 'last nation-state has done much to clarify nationalism. At the same time, however, emperor," attempts to illuminate the fatal embrace between Japanese colonialist this effort has tended to fix and objectify what is after all, a subjective, fluid and discourse and Chinese nationalism. Duara explores the contesting discourses of elusive phenomenon—the meanings of the nation to both citizens and nation- the nation, particularly the intersections of language and the competing visions state.1 In this essay I take a critical historical view of national identity and I of political communites. Borrowing from the work of deconstructionists, he is explore the phenomenon less in its distinctiveness than in its changing relation- concerned with the silences and repressions that occur in all acts of articulation. ships to other visions of political community, both historical and contemporary. Using the history of China, but also of South Asia and Japan, as his laboratory, In the problematique of modernization theories, the nation is a unique and Duara contends with the Gellner and Anderson theories of nationalism that locate unprecedented form of community which finds its place in the oppositions be- the nation in modernity and posit a radical disjuncture with premodern political tween empire and nation, tradition and modernity, and center and periphery. As communities. Whatever the importance of print capitalism in European nation- the new and sovereign subject of history, the nation embodies a moral force which making, in China an intimate relationship between the written and spoken word— supersedes dynasties and ruling clerisies, which are seen as merely partial subjects the power of pan-Chinese myths, for example, and their incorporation in folk representing only themselves through history. By contrast, the nation is a collec- drama—provided a common cultural reservoir from which agrarian peoples tive subject—whose ideal periphery exists only outside itself—poised to realize gained a sense of identity with a broad cultural and political order. Without eliding its historical destiny in a modern future.2 This narrative depicts not only the the distinctions between modern identities and others, Duara emphasizes the mul- history of nationalism, but constitutes the master narrative of much modern his- tiplicity of identities at all times and the resemblances between more traditional tory, allowing the nation-state to define the framework of its self-understanding. and national identities. My goal is to take a step in extricating history from this framework and devise a Two particularly strong conceptualizations of the political community emerged perspective from which it can historicize the nation and national identity itself. in imperial Chinese society, one the ethnic self-description of the Han people, the To see the nation as a collective subject of modernity obscures the nature of other a community based on the cultural values of the elite. In the twentieth national identity. I propose instead that we view national identity as founded upon century modern discourses of the nation from outside influenced Chinese intel- fluid relationships; it thus both resembles and is interchangeable with other po- lectuals and political actors, who combined them with selective use of existing litical identities. If the dynamics of national identity lie within the same terrain Chinese ideas of political communality. The emergence of the modem nation- as other political identities, we will need to break with two assumptions of mod- state system also powerfully determined the further elaboration of national dis- courses and identities as it promoted ethnic loyalty to territory. Rejecting any essentialist view of the nation, Duara proposes to look at national communities Prasenjit Duara, "Histoncizing National Identity, or Who Imagines What and When," unpublished as relationships based on inclusions and exclusions and argues that "an incipient essay outlining some ideas on the relationship between nationalism and history that are more fully developed in Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: nationality is formed when the perception of the boundaries of community are University of Chicago Press, 1995). transformed: when soft boundaries are transformed into hard ones." Hardening Author's note: This essay outlines some ideas on the relationship between nationalism and history occurs when a community adopts a master narrative of descent, thus defining which are more fully developed in my book Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives more exclusively who belongs and who is outside. of Modem China Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. 150 151 152 THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF NATIONALITY Historicizing National Identity 153 ernization theory. The first of these is that national identity is a radically novel on print capitalism as enabling the imagining of a common destiny and the con- form of consciousness. Below, we will develop a crucial distinction between the cept of simultaneity ignores the complex relationship between the written and modern nation-state system and nationalism as a form of identification. National spoken word. In agrarian civilizations this interrelationship furnishes an extremely identification is never fully subsumed by it and is best considered in its complex rich and subtle context for communication across the culture. For instance, in relationships to other historical identities. The second assumption is the privileg- pan-Chinese myths, such as that of Guandi, the god of war, not only were oral ing of the grand narrative of the nation as a collective historical subject. Nation- and written traditions thoroughly intertwined, but the myth provided a medium alism is rarely the nationalism of the nation, but rather represents the site where whereby different groups could announce their participation in a national culture very different views of the nation contest and negotiate with each other. Through even as they inscribed their own interpretation of the myth (through the written these two positions, we will seek to generate a historical understanding of the and other cultural media, such as folk drama and iconography) (Duara 1988b). nation that is neither historically determinist nor essentialist, and through which As such, these groups were articulating their understanding of the wider cultural we might try to recover history itself from the ideology of the nation-state. and political order from their own particular perspective. There were large num- The two most influential recent works on the subject of nationalism—by Ben- bers of people in agrarian societies who were conscious of their culture and edict Anderson and Ernest Gellner—have stressed the radically novel form of identity at multiple levels, and in that sense were perhaps not nearly so different consciousness represented by national identity. Both analysts identify national from their modern counterparts. consciousness conventionally as the coextensiveness of politics and culture—an The point is not so much that national identity existed in premodern times; overriding identification of the individual with a culture that is protected by the rather it is that the manner in which we have conceptualized political identities state. Both also provide a sociological account of how it was only in the modern is fundamentally problematic. In privileging modern society as the only social era that such a type of consciousness—where people from diverse locales could form capable of generating political self-awareness, Gellner and Anderson regard "imagine" themselves as part of a single community—was made possible. Gell- national identity as a distinctive mode of consciousness: the nation as a whole ner provides a full account of this discontinuity. Preindustrial society is formed imagining itself to be the unified subject of history. There is a special and re- of segmentary communities, each isolated from the other, with an inaccessible stricted sense in which we can think of a unified subjectivity; we shall have high culture jealously guarded by a clerisy—Gellner's general term for literati occasion below to review it in our discussion of nationalism as a relational iden- ruling elites. With the growth of industrialism, society requires a skilled, literate, tity. But this restricted sense of unity is not unique to modern society.4 The deeper